Two Athenian Marble Thrones

There are in Scotland two ancient Athenian marble thrones which I had an opportunity of studying and photographing some years ago. Both have already been published, but not so fully as to make a fresh study of them superfluous. The more important is in the Earl of Elgin's collection at Broomhall, the other is at Biel, in East Lothian, and belongs to Colonel J. P. Nisbet Hamilton Grant.An incomplete description of this marble was published in 1837 by von Stackelberg, he having seen it in Athens about 1810 on what he called ‘the site of the ancient Prytaneion’. His description was accompanied by neat engravings of two views of the throne and a view of each relief. After a lapse of time Michaelis produced further notes about it in his ‘Ancient Marbles in Great Britain’, Supplement I, in JHS V (1884) 146 ff. (with Plate XLVIII) under the title Marble throne with reliefs. He had little to say of the chair itself, much about the relief of the Tyrannicides together with a brief comment on the second relief and the inscription.It will therefore be best to give a fresh description of the throne which can now be illustrated by new photographs taken while it was in the Edinburgh exhibition (Pl. VI, a; VII; VIII, c).